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Two Poems by Katherine Soniat

Katherine Soniat

Katherine Soniat’s seventh collection, Bright Stranger, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in spring 2016. The Goodbye Animals, recently received the Turtle Island Quarterly Chapbook Award and will be published by Foothills Press this December. The Poetry Council of North Carolina selected The Swing Girl (LSU Press) as Best Collection of 2011 and A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Work appears in World Poetry Portfolio #60, Saint Katherine Review, Hotel Amerika, storySouth, Prairie Schooner (Waterfusion),and Connotations Press. Previously on the faculty on at Hollins University and Virginia Tech, she teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNC-Asheville.

It’s afternoon in Key West, and navy shipsanchor in the harbor. Not a gun is fired.

My mother and I look alike because we arein matching pinafores with our names sewn on.

The world’s about us when I am four. Ourhems touch the same place on our knees.

I look at her knee, then up and wonder whatit’s like to be high as her above the sand. We

walk side by side on a back road, then I forgetthe rest, but keep wondering where dead babies

end up. Somewhere on the shores of the Servern nearAnnapolis, my father once said, then that he

knew no more. Tiny bones tucked in dirt by water.But I am flying north now as any child can do. Up

the coastline over lighthouses, graveyards, and sand-boxes on the lawns. I am on my trip away from walking

with my mother in a place called stinky fishing village. Last nighta man yelled that when I had on this dress touching my knees that werelike, or maybe were, hers. I don’t know what belongs to who or whereanybody’s going. I am happier in our mother-daughter clothes. Sort oflike being a fish out looking for others, then spotting swirls of everyfish ever—and a lost baby alive in the sand.